Development Blog

July 1, 2016

After several months of hard work we are happy to finally release SuperTuxKart 0.9.2.

This release includes a lot of work from Benau, a new developer. Thanks to him, we are now supporting TTF fonts, which is a lot easier for us to maintain and should ensure that
all characters from all main languages are now available. He also finished recording races and ghost replays (where you can try to beat a recorded race), which were started as Google Summer of Code projects, but never completely integrated. Additionally he finished and significantly improved work on computer opponents in battle mode, and even added the ability to play in teams with and against the computer in soccer mode. Binaries and source code can as always be found on our download page.

Copa Antarctica

SuperTuxKart 0.9.2 Poster

To celebrate the new AI support for soccer mode, we created a poster for "Copa Antarctica" Antarctica Cup, a set of 3 arenas. The first one made by Benau and Samuncle is a new soccer field called "Icy Soccer Field", which is included in the release:

Similar to what we have done in the past, we are offering the remaining others as gift package for people donating to SuperTuxKart. This
package includes a new arena and soccer stadium "Las Dunas", in a
daytime version and a separate nighttime version for soccer competition.

Additionally the gift package will also include the latest version of "Candela City", which was previously included in the gift package. The gift package can be downloaded after donating to SuperTuxKart. We use this money to pay for addon and web server for now, and will be using more for network development.

But we have even more new tracks. Included is now also "Antediluvian Abyss" track by Samuncle, which replaces the old subsea track. An early-access version of this track was part of our previous gift package for donators, but as promised it is now released as part of the standard release.

We also included a new track by first time contributor Ponzino - a new 'Volcan Isand" track:

Ozone0ne and Krobonil have also contributed a new original song for the farm track; and Flakebi implemented a new kart characteristic system, which makes it much easier to modify the kart physics and have karts with different behaviour.

As mentioned in the previous post, networked multiplayer is unfortunately not available yet as there is more work needed to make it work well. We have done some serious work, and a lot of improvements to show, but feel that it is not yet good enough for a special LAN-only mode. More work is needed to make LAN mode work good enough for an enjoyable game experience, and we decided to spent more time and have a good release instead of one that would potentially suffer from stuttering. But stay tuned for more news on networking, it is our top priority.

Say hello to SuperTuxKart.net

TuxKart was released more than 10 years ago and at this time web standards where pretty basic. The most curious of you can see how it looked here. When the project was renamed SuperTuxKart a new website was done and while the pages where basic it provided everything the project needed.

In April 2010, Tom Jenkins, a web designer, developed a new custom skin for our website and at the time we did a blog article explaining the update. This version has remained in use until a few days ago. While the design was cool a few years ago it started to look a bit outdated, but also, most importantly, the smartphone revolution changed the way we browse internet. We were also using a SourceForge.net as the main domain of the project which left us helpless during the SourceForge crash and unable to communicate or redirect players to a mirror.

This is why a new modern, responsive website was designed and implemented by Jean-Manuel Clémençon and Konstin. This new website is hosted on our own server, which should hopefully be more reliable and flexible than sourceforge's hosting.

From now on we will use exclusively the domain supertuxkart.net. and sourceforge will be one of the mirrors to download the game. The new website works on all screen sizes (you can resize your browser window to see it in action) and can embed our videos and images more easily. Each character now has their own little story in the discover page.

A few things are still missing and we are working to improve the documentation, especially for artists who want to create karts, tracks and objects for SuperTuxKart. We hope you will enjoy the new website.

June 16, 2016

It's already been several months since the last release of SuperTuxKart, but we have not been idle! The next release, 0.9.2 is coming soon and we are today releasing the first release candidate. Please help us test this new release to make sure that everything works correctly!

This release includes work from Benau, a developer who recently started contributing to SuperTuxKart. Thanks to him, STK now supports recording races and ghost replays (where you can try to beat a recorded race) as well as an AI for the 3 strikes battle and soccer modes, enabling them to be played in single player for the first time (or in multiplayer with more karts). He also rewrote our font handling system to now use TTF fonts, which is a lot easier to maintain for us and should ensure that all characters from all main languages are now available. We thank him for his dedication!

This new release also marks the introduction of a few new tracks :

New "Antediluvian Abyss" track by samuncle

New "Volcan Island" track by Ponzino

New icy soccer field by samuncle and Benau

0zone0ne and Krobonil have also contributed a new original song for the farm track.

Now for the disappointing bit: our most popular feature request is for networked multiplayer, unfortunately this is not ready yet. We have already invested a significant amount of time on this feature, and made some good progress on the LAN implementation:

we can already connect LAN clients without requiring an online account

we can create a server from the GUI

we even can compile a no-graphics standalone server

We have actually already played some LAN games (and even tried a WAN game once) - admittedly with some restricted features (no items), but the overall result was that the simplified approach for LAN does not work good enough. In some environments we had a satisfactory playing experience (typically using wired connections), but in others (especially when using wireless networking) the game just stuttered and shook too much to be fun. So we decided to not publish a LAN-only version as originally planned, but still go ahead with a release now, since Benau has added a lot of nice features to the game which we think our players will appreciate to have.

We expect LAN will work much better in less ideal environments (and that includes using wifi) with the upcoming WAN code (for the more technical inclined: using client-side prediction and rollback to hide latency). We are aware that this is a disappointing for the majority of our fans out there, but we really did not want to publish an overall rather disappointing networked multiplayer version.

February 17, 2016

Hi everyone!Version française de l'article disponible ici
It has been a long time since the previous blog post. A lot of things happened on the backstage, but before going into the details, we have exciting news for all European players.

Eldermé who is refactoring the 3D renderer and correcting bugs on Intel HD GPU

Benau who implemented a new font rendering engine based on TTF fonts. He also finished the battle AI, which means you will be able soon to play "3 Strikes Battle" against the computer. We might also eventually use this to extend story mode with a few battles! A "Soccer Mode" AI and finishing ghost replay feature in "Time Trial" mode are also features he has been working on.

Playing against bots in arena mode

We are also making progress toward online multiplayer. One of the current major tasks are polishing the UI to make it easy to launch a server, create a new race, etc. However another minor release this year before getting the online features ready is to be expected.

October 17, 2015

After countless hours of bug fixing, tweaking and improvements we are proud to announce the release of SuperTuxKart 0.9.1.

The gift package for donators has also been updated: it contains the new Candela City track, which is heavily featured in our new trailer. It's the first next generation track in a city inspired by various real places.

Candela City during the world fair

But the gift package contains more: Samuncle has updated Antediluvian Abyss, which was included as a sneak peak in the previous gift package. The underwater landscape has been improved and you can spot fishes swimming and underwater ruins.

While these tracks will most likely receive some more tweaks and minor improvements, they are otherwise finished. Both tracks from the gift package will of course be released as part of the core game in a future version of SuperTuxKart.

An ancient city at the bottom of the sea

If you want to support SuperTuxKart, we encourage you to go to our donation page, where you will be able to donate some money to this project, after which you will get the URL for the gift package. If you have donated US$5 or more in the past, please contact us, and you will get this new package without a new donation.

The track 'Carnaval del cacao'
that was included in our previous gift package is now available for everyone as promised released under CC-BY 3.0 on our
addons webpage.

Carnaval del cocoa The famous Val Verdian carnival

The core game wasn't forgotten either, and we are happy to show that the oldest track in SuperTuxKart - Oliver's Math Class - has finally received some love and attention:

Now we know the classroom number !

Other tracks were also updated to take advantage of the newer engine. Here some more screenshots:

Enjoying the Sun at Gran Paradiso

Extraterrestrial racing on a strange red planet

The spaceship just got a new data center

But we also did work on the core game and fixed and improved several bugs and issues. We have now the ability to change the direction of arrows (indicating in which direction to drive) when a track is driven in reverse, and we already utilize this in STK Enterprise. Some tweaking of the physics has taken place, hopefully resulting in more stable beahviour of karts, and we significantly improved audio handling. A very important and time consuming change was the introduction of scripting: this will allow track designers to include little scripts which are executed by STK to make tracks more dynamic. This allowed us to remove the tutorial implementation in C++, which is now done in AngelScript instead, and as a first example Cocoa Temple now includes barrels that can be destroyed. Hopefully this will result in more interesting and dynamic tracks in the future: you want monkeys to throw coconuts when the karts are coming closer, now you can do this. Finally, many challenges were tweaked to be more balanced.

As a quick look into the future: we are expecting to further improve the look of STK by replacing the current bitmap-based font system with a TTF renderer, which will hopefully make STK look better in various languages. More work on scripting is also planned, so if you are a 3d modeller and want to implement certain features in your track, let us know what functionality you need. And we have already started on the network implementation. And while this is nothing that will be finished in a month or two, we are working towards a release first with LAN-only support, followed by WAN support later.

As always the new version can be downloaded from http://supertuxkart.sourceforge.net/Downloads. We look forward to your feedback and comments (and contributions?). Also please be aware that this blog is not the right forum for support requests and bug reports - please use either our forum, or our bug tracker.

September 30, 2015

It's been a few months since the release of version 0.9, and we have since been busy fixing bugs, improving performance and doing other minor tweaks here and there. It's taken longer than we would have liked, but better late than never, the release candidate version 0.9.1 is now available!

We have improved the audio handling significantly and for the first time are using scripting in our overworld and tutorial, which removes a lot of hard-coded C++ code. Scripting is based on AngelScript and was the result of last year's Google Summer of Code work. We expect to use and enhance scripting steadily to make our tracks more dynamic.
Samuncle was also busy improving out tracks. Our oldest and most classical track "Oliver's Math Class" got a great makeover:

Subsea and Fort Magma have also been improved. Subsea actually includes part of a track which was included in our first donation package - we are well on the way to completely replace Subsea in the near future.

We are also working on brand new high quality tracks. They aren't
fully ready, but we can show you these screenshots. More information
about them will be given in the coming days.